This Tuesday (May 3rd) is “National Teacher Appreciation Day” in the US.

I know, it’s easy to feel a little cynical about these ‘National <insert your cause here> Week’ proclamations – it can sometimes seem that they’re primarily about safe uncontroversial camera time for the politicians proposing them.  On the other hand, “National Teacher Appreciation Day” has me taking a minute or two to reflect back on two of the best teachers I’ve had: one from my master’s degree studies, one from back in high school.

Here, by way of a belated ‘thank you’, is a little about them…

Navin Chopra, Economics My master’s degree curriculum was made up of equal parts Stern School of Business MBA courses and NYU graduate-level computer science courses.  At NYU, computer science is part the mathematics department, and although math is a  big deal there, the fact remains that computer science has less to do with mathematics than you’d think – so I always had the impression it was given short shrift at NYU.  Not so the Stern MBA courses I was spending the other half of my time in – while I was there, Financial Times had the school ranked 10th worldwide and 3rd worldwide in finance.  So as I sat surrounded by MBA students for Professor Chopra’s first ‘Foundations of Finance’ lecture, I was eager to see what all the fuss was about.

‘Foundations of Finance’ was part of the MBA core curriculum, and was viewed at Stern as something akin to ‘economics boot camp’.  The material was challenging, and the course moved quickly: NPV, IRR, PVIFA, yield curves, bond pricing, correlation coefficients…  I’ll be honest, I’ve half-forgotten many of those formulas, and I haven’t touched the scientific calculator I had to buy for the course since minutes after finishing my final exam.  To this day, though, I’m still struck by how rewarding (and enjoyable) Professor Chopra made the experience.  Granted, it was a self-selected, highly motivated room to begin with – but he had most of us wanting to learn this difficult material for its own sake - we were  into it.  And let’s be honest, that’s not often the case in business school (it appears Prof. Chopra has since moved on to Columbia Business School – NYU’s loss).

Given that half my courses met in the Institute of Mathematics building, it’s a little ironic that the math I was exposed to while at NYU happened down the street at the b-school, but that’s what ‘Foundations of Finance’ was – essentially, a math class.  What I particularly appreciated were the fleeting glimpses into the beauty of the math that Prof. Chopra seemed to get a kick out of showing us: more than once, we’d be taken up to a certain point with some new formula or chart, and then with a trace of a dry smile, he’d reveal it as another way of approaching the same concept expressed by an entirely different formula or chart we had covered a month and a half ago.  During those ‘eureka’ moments, I suddenly  understood (for the first time!) how a young person could become fascinated enough with math and/or economics to choose a career based upon it, as Prof. Chopra had clearly done (and as has I had done with music, back in high school).

Which brings me to…

Arthur Simeone Mr. Simeone was one of my high school’s three music teachers (I’m pretty confident that’s not so common anymore).   He taught chorus and music theory, and although chorus was not my thing, I did take his music theory classes – and in that laser-like way teenagers can become fascinated by things, I became fascinated by the harmonic architecture of music.

In addition to his teaching, Mr. Simeone was also a jazz piano player of some local renown.  To have a professional musician in my midst, the first I’d ever met – well, that made a big impression on me.  It wasn’t jazz harmony that he was teaching us, though – Mr. Simeone’s theory classes were based around the study of “figured bass” (“generalbass” in German), a type of chord notation used 350 years ago during the Baroque period.  As it happens, the study of this archaic notation makes for a great introduction to music theory, because it introduces into the relatively ‘vertical’ study of harmony some basic counterpoint (which deals with the relative ‘horizontal’ movement of notes) – but I digress.  The point is, although he was the ‘cool’ teacher with a mysterious and (to me, at least) glamorous musical life outside school, Arthur Simeone’s music theory classes were pretty rigorous.  Baroque music is all about structural and logical soundness, and so working with figured bass involves following some hard and fast rules – the teaching of which he took very seriously.  Like Prof. Chopra, he had great respect for the subject matter, which proved infectious in the classroom.

He also managed to approach the subject matter with a curiosity (and even a playfulness) students could identify with, and that proved infectious too.  Granted, by then I had just resolved to pursue music seriously, had little use for high school other than my music courses, and was about to graduate six months early to study music for a semester at a local state university – maybe it’s not surprising, then, that I was so impressed by a music teacher – maybe it was the subject matter itself.  Alas, for my own sake, I wish that was true: in my undergraduate studies I found it was possible, quite possible, in fact, to have some astoundingly bad music teachers – even at a ‘prestigious’ conservatory.

No, Mr. Simeone would have been a great teacher regardless of the subject.  He also would have had an equally great effect on his students regardless of whether he taught at a local high school or at a major conservatory – and since “National Teacher Appreciation Day” is primarily about the same public school teachers who are being made such political scapegoats of these days (cue Jon Stewart), this a point worth using the bold font for.

What makes a good teacher?  I think you’ve first got to have some innate talent for the simple ‘public speaking’ aspect of it, there’s no way around that (I’ve given just enough workshops to suspect that this might be a talent that, unlike my university professor brother, I might lack).  The more crucial quality, though, is intellectual generosity.  Although one taught at an internationally ranked business school and one taught in a suburban New York high school, both Prof. Chopra and Mr. Simeone both ‘got it’ – they both approached the job of teaching without bringing any ego-related baggage of their own to the table, and maybe that in itself was a lesson.

So, thanks Professor Chopra.

Thanks, Mr. Simeone.

And to our readers, I hope you’ve been lucky enough to have a teacher as good as either of these guys – happy National Teacher Appreciation Day.

On internet use at work… There was an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker magazine by James Surowiecki.  Citing a University of Copenhagen study on the effects of willpower and deprivation, Surowiecki raises the possibility that although many companies routinely restrict access to websites such as YouTube and facebook in an effort to increase productivity, overly restricting employees’ personal access to the internet from the workplace could also adversely affect productivity.

The cloud is falling, the cloud is falling… From Lydia Leong at Gartner comes the best explanation we’ve come across yet as to what actually happened last week to cause Amazon’s Web Services/EC2 outage – and what it means to users of its cloud computing services.

As it turns out, it’s both less scary and more scary than you might think: the failure was limited to database access (the actual EC2 server instances were unaffected) in the Northeast US, and was caused by an automated self-induced storm of backups.

That’s the less scary part – the scarier part is there appears to be surprisingly little transparency and consensus regarding Amazon’s EC2 resiliency structure and fail-over options (and consequently, little understanding of them on the part of their customers).

On the economics of the internet… “How much more than the actual cost of your computer and your mobile devices (and the electricity and internet services they require) would someone have to pay you never to use them again?”

“What makes the internet a fundamentally less relevant invention than the railroads of a century ago?”

These are just a few of the questions addressed recently in two interesting articles by Slate‘s Annie Lowrey on the economics of the internet.  You can find them here and here.

P.S. Lastly – for those of you who’ve gotten an iPhone and/or an iPad, but haven’t quite gotten around to getting a life to go with them yet, here’s a list of the 10 best Prince William royal wedding apps.

Another month, another European trade show.  This time it’s musikmesse, the world’s largest musical instrument and accessory trade event.  Held in Frankfurt every April, musikmesse covers everything from musical instruments to DJ equipment to audio software (which is why I was there).
Think of the largest music store on the planet, spread across 6 or 7 huge convention halls – in other words, heaven, hell, or a bit of both, depending on your point of view.

Last month I wrote about my trip to CeBIT – musikmesse is, as you might imagine, quite a different kind of trade show experience.  One thing both shows have in common, though, is their own iPhone app.  Driven by an app store model that’s made applications safe, easy to install/uninstall, and often free, the use of such disposable event-specific apps is on the rise.  In fact, a dedicated mobile app – complete with exhibitor lists, floor plans, GPS, and some degree of social networking functionality (usually twitter) – has become ‘de rigeuer’ for any self-respecting trade show these days.

So I decided to try musikmesse’s iPhone app out.

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American football is big money.  Surprisingly, though, one team – the Green Bay Packers, who play in the smallest NFL market (ever been to Green Bay, Wisconsin?) and who are still named for their first sponsor (a local meat-packing company that paid for their uniforms) have managed to remain a non-profit, community-owned company.

Mozilla – the Green Bay Packers of browser companies.  They’re the only non-profit corporation in the increasingly big money browser-building game, and like Green Bay, they have a storied and proud past – Mozilla’s history traces all the way back to Marc Andreeson and the ground-breaking Netscape browser of over 15 years ago.

With a market share over twice that of Google’s Chrome (the nearest competitor that doesn’t enjoy the advantage of coming bundled as part of an operating system), Mozilla’s Firefox browser has been quite a success.  As of late, though, Firefox has been facing some challenges: Chrome is now the fastest-growing browser out there, and Microsoft, having ‘gotten religion’ on the open standards issue, can now boast of having the most HTML5-compliant browser out there, as rated by the WC3.

So Mozilla needs the just-released Firefox 4 to be a hit – and it looks like it is, having racked up good reviews and almost 16 million downloads in the first 48 hours of its release.  As one of those 16 million, I’ve used Firefox 4 for a few days now on both Windows 7 and OS X machines (I’m using it right now, as a matter of fact).  I have to say, I like it very much – but rather than attempt a detailed review, though (there are enough FF4 reviews out there already), I’ll share just a few impressions:

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It’s not often we outright endorse a product here at digitalmissive (ok, we’ve never done it).  Well, I’m going to have to make an exception in the case of Logitech’s Squeezebox internet radio.  I’ve been loving this < $200 device for a few months now.  Even if you’re not an expat in a far-off land suffering from the occasional spontaneous craving to listen to radio from places you used to live (say, KCRW in Los Angeles, or Jersey City’s very own WFMU) without having to go turn on your  computer, this little guy is well worth it.  Turn it on, put it on your home wireless network, and you’re good to go: the radio connects to Logitech’s servers and features a pretty well-optimized interface for searching and accessing an surprisingly extensive range of radio stations from around the world.  So extensive, in fact, that you soon might find yourself playing with it, listening to Jamaican news reports or Polish pop music.  Strangely, it’s more satisfying surfing for global internet radio using a device like the Squeezebox than it is using a web browser: the fact that it’s not “a computer” makes it feel somehow more special, like the internet-age incarnation of old-fashioned ham radio.

How does it sound?  Really pretty good for the price.  There’s also an accessory pack available with a remote and an internal battery pack, but although the prospect of being able to pick up my Squeezbox and take it with me to the kitchen or the bedroom is appealing, at $50, I haven’t quite sprung for the battery yet (besides, for remote control, there’s always the obligatory iPad app). Yep, this little thing is pretty cute – and the Logitech folks in charge of aggregating radio stations over on the server side have done a really impressive job (I’m not alone in my admiration – on Amazon US, the Squeezebox averages 4.5 stars across almost 450 reviews). Now if only someone could manage to do such a good job with internet television….

As promised, last week I took the train from Berlin to Hannover for a day at CeBIT.  This was my first opportunity to visit Europe’s largest technology exposition since moving to Berlin, and since Andreas had already made his annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the CES show back in January, I was eager to go – and eager to compare notes with Mr. Wuerfel.

It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course – while the Consumer Electronics Show is limited to Consumer Electronics, CeBit’s scope is much wider: the “B” in CeBit stands for office technology (büroautomation in German), the “I” stands for information technology, and the “T” stands for telecommunications. No, the “Ce” does not stand for consumer electronics, but that industry’s well represented at CeBIT too (see the photo below of attendees trying out 3D television) – in short, CeBit covers it all.

Put another way…

• CES is a big show.
• CeBit is a massive show.

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I don’t get computer gaming, I really don’t.

I did get a bit curious about it, though, after finding these two World of Warcraft YouTube videos using my music as a soundtrack:

  

A fair number of musical leftovers from my past life as a composer have already washed up on the shores of YouTube (just how they’re used there is totally out of my control – for more on how I ended up as an accidental Youtube music provider, click here).  What caught my attention about these two videos, though, were their view counts: 120,000 for one, over 280,000 for the other.

The previously most-viewed YouTube video using my music is a fairly creepy clip of slowly rotating mannequin torsos posted by a UK online lingerie seller entitled “Sexy Nylon Silky Bum Panties” (“Bum Panties” evidently being a type of undergarment available exclusively in the UK).  No doubt helped by its titillating keyword-filled title, that clip has been viewed about 79,000 times – still far less views than either of these recent World of Warcraft clips has garnered in far less time. 

This begs the question: what is it about computer gaming – in particular, internet-enabled social computer gaming - that’s so compelling?

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A week or two ago I wrote about Google’s Chrome web browser to complain that the first three Chrome web “apps” I “installed” turned out to be nothing more than simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled sites available on any web browser.  What really bothered me, though, was Chrome’s disingenuous user interface.  The “app installation” process was in fact nothing more than the simple and instantaneous saving of a URL string as a bookmark – yet in an apparent attempt to convince the user there was more going on than there actually was, Chrome went as far as displaying a spinning progress wheel for a second or two.  It’s my suspicion this progress wheel was merely a ‘prop’.

And this illustrates the challenge facing Chrome as it transitions from the ‘browser-as-application’ it is today to the ‘browser-as-operating-system‘ of tomorrow:

While Chrome OS will enjoy certain thin-client advantages (instant-on, greater ease-of-use, and near immunity to malware), these advantages alone aren’t enough to make for a compelling product (or it would have already happened). As the essence of the operating system, the Chrome browser will also have to differentiate itself from all the competing standalone browsers out there running Flash (and in a few years, HTML5).  In other words, Chrome must evolve beyond the conventional browser paradigm: there has to to be some degree of Chrome value-add in terms of increased functionality and/or performance.

Well, this week Google made a step in that direction: Chrome web apps can now run in the background as processes, even when all Chrome windows are closed.  This will allow for asynchronous user notifications and the preloading of content into local memory – but more importantly, with Chrome OS devices expected to launch later this year, it’s an indication Google is hard at work after all on the kinds of ‘browser 2.0′ innovations required to make Chrome OS a success.

The New York Times continues to improve upon its already exceptional technology reporting – for example, consider this recent piece on Nokia and the reasons behind the company’s major fail in the smart phone market.  The primary culprit?  Something we’ve written about several times: an inability to understand the value of consumer electronics product design relative to engineering (digitalmissive’s recent case study: Sony).

For an articulate (and fun-to-read) description of  a ‘big picture’ academic subject, check out Lev Grossman’s recent piece on Ray Kurzweil and the concept of “Singularity” in Time Magazine.  Regardless of whether you agree with the central premise that exponential technological progress will result in machines superseding the human brain in a few decades (and all that implies), the writing is superb and worth your time.

The Atlantic is a publication that can boast of history of great writing – whether technology-related or not.  Here’s a good article on how internet privacy (and the ‘memory’ of the internet) is viewed fundamentally differently on either side of, well, the Atlantic.

P.S. Lastly, from several Apple rumor sites comes word that the company could be considering creating an “Apple television“.   The evidence for this claim is a recent Apple job position posting mentioning a “next generation of Apple devices”, including “TV”.   This is something we’ve been speculating about since 2009.

Last week we wrote about dropbox, and how business concerns can sometimes muddy the waters of what (in a perfect world) should be a transparent and open relationship – the relationship between technology and us humans.

The week before, we wrote about Chrome OS, Google’s view of a cloud-based, thin-client future of personal computing.

Here then, is a post combining these two themes.

The other day, I started playing around with the Chrome Web Store.  We’ve been interested in the Chrome OS since it was a just a twinkle in Google’s eye, and now that devices running the new ‘browser-as-operating system’ are just a few months away from hitting the market, it seemed like high time to check out  these Chrome “apps”.

So I “downloaded”‘ and “installed” a few of these “apps” onto the Chrome browser: a few from Aviary having to do with photo and audio editing, and a music streaming service from from a company called Grooveshark.  Initially, I was pretty impressed – I got it.  Then I started seeing  Adobe Flash prompts popping up when I tried to use the <back> key, and a thought occurred to me – was I looking at a brave new world of Chrome web apps, or was I looking at merely a few simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites masquerading as Chrome-specific “apps”?  The obvious thing to do was to try accessing these same URLs directly from a different browser, so that’s what I did – and lo and behold,  my shiny new Chrome “apps” functioned identically on Firefox - without having anything to do with Chrome.  At all.

So mere months before Chrome OS devices are slated to start hitting the market, all three Chrome ‘apps’ I tried out were really just bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites available on any browser.  If you’re Google, that’s a problem.  What bothered me more, though, was how Google chose to handle that problem: by misrepresenting a simple bookmark as an “App” that “requires Chrome” that’s saved via a button labeled “Install” – all of which is followed by a few seconds of a (completely bogus?) OS X-style spinning progress ring!

In short, the simple saving of a generic bookmark is being made to look like a Chrome-specific “application installation”.

I do want to like the Chrome OS, I really do – but that kind of thing, well, it ticks us off a bit (we hate it when our software is being – let’s say – disingenuous with us).

P.S. Maybe the more interesting aspect of this whole story, though, is how Google will differentiate the Chrome Flash (and later, HTML5) user experience from the Flash/HTML5 user experience offered via competing browsers – because if the Chrome OS is going to gain real traction, there’s going to have to be some additional ‘value add’ to the Chrome browser proposition.  In other words, Chrome will have to become extensible in such a way as to allow for optimized (Javascript/HTML5) performance and for more native-feeling (and standardized)  user  interfaces and control sets than those offered by other standalone browsers.